An Amateur At Best

Friday, June 7, 2013

Not solely on memories as you say
But on memories and each other to fill our days
Not to grow old slow and alone until over is our stay
But to together see the seasons turn back to whence they came
Not by cursing the empty luck that takes us our separate ways
But by basking in the destiny that crises-crosses our paths again and again
Not for losing hope of seeing one another and just walking away
But for trusting in the magic that always ensures we meet each other half way

Friday, March 8, 2013

So it seems it really isn't possible for some things to come about,
it suddenly seems that anything is possible could just be a slogan you shout,

So I ask do we get old because despite bleeding every time we fail to chain our dreams the next time around,
Or do we age because we've used fetters so heavy they cost us life but save us pain and self doubt,

So they wished me well by insisting I don't count the chickens before they come out,
but isn't half hearted love like the hat from which the rabbit is pulled out,

So I was asked why I was given a heart so stout,
Now I know it is so because it must last a lifetime of rout,

So I have decided that from this eternal test I will not bow out,
if God could make a beautiful flower once then surely he could make it again is my prayer devout.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

This post is
intended as a very brief guide to the development of the modern Arabic script
and derived scripts (Persian /Urdu/Sindhi/Balochi/Afghani/Turkic and their
friends). The history of the development of the Arabic script proper is to an
extent a history of Quranic orthography ie the way the Quran is written out in
the Arabic script. I have tried to steer clear of any historical and
hagiographical controversies and presented only the bare minimum of information
needed to get a clear grasp of the journey of the Arabic script from its
embryonic stage to maturity. I hope this will serve as an introduction to my
next post which will be on the different styles of Arabic calligraphy.

Super Short History of Arabic's Ancestors

Arabic is a Semitic
language and all Semitic scripts (not languages) are based on the
proto-Canaanite script. It is agreed that Proto-Canaanite is a child of
Egyptian Hieroglyphswith a hint of
Akkadian DNA (completely different from Hieroglyphs). The pictographic Egyptian
Hieroglyphs become proto-Canaanite Acrophones, symbols in which the symbol
represents only the first sound of the word depicted by the same symbol in
Egyptian Hieroglyphs rather than the whole word itself, eg. the hut Hieroglyph
symbol depicted the word "beyt" (house) in totality but actually just
stood for only the "b" sound of "beyt" in the Acrophonic
proto-Canaanite script.

In the Semitic
language, tree over time, the Proto-Canaanite script mothered the Phoenician
script which begot the Aramaic script which birthed the Nabataean script which
bore the Arabic script. It is very important to note that the Nabataean script
used only 22 consonants and early Arabic had to make do with these 22 symbols
for its own repertoire of 28 consonants. This 22 vs 28 difference will be
significant later. Another feature of almost all of these Semitic scripts was
that they did not depicts vowels (long or short), something of a family trait
because the Egyptian Hieroglyphs omit vowels too; this also should be kept in
mind for later on.

This would also be a
good place to mention that the Greek, Roman and many Indian scripts (and their
spawns) are also derivatives of the proto-Canaanite script. So Arabic and
Devanagari are distant cousins and most of the things mentioned so far apply to the
Indic/Greek/Roman scripts as well.

Now let's come to
the Arabic script itself. As of now, the first definitive example of what can
be called as Arabic script is a rock engraving, an epitaph of a certain Mrs
Raqush, found in Mada'in Saleh (Saudi Arabia) dated to about 267AD. Some
scholars believe this script to be something in between Nabataean and Arabic
and others unequivocally classify it as Arabic script. This inscription does
have some words in the Thamud scripts as well. However do not assume that this
is the oldest inscription in Arabic language.
Many, much older, Arabic language samples have been found, albeit
written/engraved in non-Arabic scripts such as pre-Islamic Arabic poetry
written in Nabataean, Aramaic, Thamudic, Epigraphic South Arabian scripts etc.

The famous Raqush
inscription to the left and modern Arabic copy/interpretation to the right. Can
you make out any of the words in the original? Without the aid of the modern
copy I can barely recognize the odd عhere and the oddلthere and one حand a فيsomewhere and that's
all conjecture too. The second word in the second line is Raqoosh.Of course I have
forgotten most of my Arabic anyway. But this must have been perfectly legible
to the people it was meant for.

Jumping forward
three and a half centuries after the demise of Mrs Raqush we come to the era of
the Quranic revelations (610-632AD). By this time the Arabic script had been
modified a lot more from the semi-Nabataen form and had come much closer to its
final form. The initial Meccan utterances in the Quraishi dialect of Arabic by
Prophet Muhammad were shorter and quickly committed to memory by the small but
fast expanding group of Muslims. However by the time the Prophet emigrated to
Medina the revealed verses became much longer as did the size of the Muslim
community. Now secretaries started recording these longer Arabic verses on
whatever medium was ready at hand at the moment of revelation, be it animal
hide, parchment, rocks, leaves or bones etc. These written records were created
purely as memory aids and not as written scripture. According to Kees
Versteegh, this shift from an purely oral Meccan record of the divine words to
a partially written Medinan record is attested to in the Quran itself, through
the shift in the usage of the word Quran (recite this), referring to the sacred
revelations in the earlier verses to the word Kitaab (book), referring to the
sacred revelations in the later verses. However the key thing to remember here
is that despite the growing importance of a written record, for the Quranic
verses as well as the pre and post Islamic Arabic poetry these written records
were still secondary to the primary method of preserving something which was to
memorize it (except in the case of commercial transactions and war treaties).
This tradition of oral recitation and transmission is quite well entrenched in
most Semitic cultures and religions so much so that to this day those who
commit the Quran to memory are bestowed the title of "Haafiz" which
means the preserver/protector, one who preserves the sacred text in his/her
heart. Hence even till the a few years after the death of Prophet Muhammad
(632AD) the written records were considered secondary as there were thousands
of "reciters" who knew the Quran by heart and had learnt it from the
Prophet's own mouth.

Supposed letter dictated by Prophet Muhammad to a
scribe and then dispatched to the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, circa 630AD.
Regardless of the authenticity, if this text is indeed from around 630-650AD it
clearly shows the strong departure of the Arabic script from its Nabataean
sandbox-days as depicted in the Raqush engraving. I can easily make out quite a
few letters (and words!) of this text.

Although the scripts
used in the 5th-8th Centuries were very different from the one given below,
this table gives an idea of what the shapes of the different Arabic letters
were at this time, which sounds they represented and how common shapes were
used for very different sounds. One can see that there are no dots, diacritical
marks, above any of the letters.

As noted in the
table given above:

The sounds b/t/th
were represented by the same symbol.

The sounds j/H/kh
were represented by the same symbol.

The sounds d/dh were
represented by the same symbol.

The sounds s/sh were
represented by the same symbol.

The sounds ṣ / ḓ
were represented by the same symbol.

The sounds ṭ / ẓ
were represented by the same symbol.

The sounds r/z were
represented by the same symbol.

The sounds `/gh were
represented by the same symbol.

Early Caliphate Era - The Rashidun

In less than 15
years of the death of the Prophet certain developments compelled his
successors, the Caliphs, to take make changes in the written Quran and the
Arabic script. First, many of the reciters died in battles against the
apostates, the Romans and the Persians. A famous, oft quoted, example is of the
half a thousand reciters who died at the Battle of Yamama in632AD; an event which so perturbed the pious
Uthman that he convinced the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, to overcome "the loss
of much of the Quran" by having it compiled into a book. Second, the
increasing number of non-Arab converts to Islam, who were new to the Arabic
language and sounds, often incorrectly recited the Quranic verses. Finally, many
of the Muslims started to disagree amongst each other on the pronunciation and
meaning of some words as the Prophet had clearly declared that there were seven
different, perfectly equal, readings of the Quran, based upon the different
urban and Bedouin dialects of Arabic in his time. When Uthman became the third
Caliph (644-652AD) he decided to bring an end to the worry of "forgetting
the Quran" and also to the conflicts caused by the variant readings by
undertaking a codification of the Quran. He collected all the written sheets of
Quran from the Prophet's time, had them collated them into one definitive
edition and then returned the sheets to Hafsa, the widow of the Prophet from
whom he had taken them in the first place . For some reasons there are no
extant samples of the original written records of the Quranic revelations made
by the secretaries of Prophet Muhammad. This "final" version was sent
to every province of the geometrically expanding Islamic empire as the authorized
Quran and all non-compliant written variants were destroyed by state officials.
Some variants were concealed but ultimately lost to the hands of man or of
time.

Umayyad and Very Early Abbasid Caliphate Eras

However, soon two
characteristics which the Arabic script had inherited from Nabataean and had
not caused any problems before now returned to haunt the Arabic script's
efficacy in a vast and diverse empire. Quranic orthography still employed 22
symbols to depict its 28 consonant sounds and it did still did not depict
vowels in writing. This negated any real codification and unification efforts
which the Caliph Umar had hoped to achieve with his authoritative final version
of the Quran.

1.The first
characteristic of using 22 symbols to depict 28 sounds caused a problem in
identifying the correct letters.The examples below
illustrates the problem. Without diacritical points to identify which of the
phonemes (sounds) is being referred to, only reference to context or external
guidance can help shed some light on the correct word which is implied by the
author of the text.

The problems caused
by misreading of Bs for Ts and Rs for Zs and so forth had reached an inflection
point and something had to be done to correct the situation. Some accounts
would have us believe that under the aegis of the Umayyad governor Hajjaj ibn Yusuf(d.714AD), the diacritical points were
innovated and adopted for use in the Quranic texts in order to remove the
ambiguity in reading. However the actual historical evidence proves these
accounts are largely apocryphal. As of now, the oldest usage of such
diacritical points has been found on a papyrus called Perf No. 558, a
billingual (Greek and Arabic) advance tax receipt which dates itself to 643 AD,
a decade an a half before Hajjaj ibn Yusuf was even born. The Arabic text in
this tax receipt has some letters dotted and others undotted and the dots
appear to have been used in a very matter of fact way. Although Perf No. 558
has not been studied extensively, it is clear that at least 20 years after the
Hejira of the Prophet, if not earlier, non-religious Arabic texts occasionally
employed diacritical points to eliminate faulty reading of the text.

Based on the
evidence of Perf No. 558, it can be stated that Arabic script did have
diacritical points used as a tool to proper understanding of the text. The
Arabic letters with the diacritical points to differentiate them from each
other would have looked almost exactly like the ones used today, as shown in
the table given below. The dots help, as shown in the mountain/dementia/rope
example above to readHowever mere
availability is not the same as active usage and we know for a fact that the
Arabic Qurans did not employ the diacritical points, perhaps largely to avoid
any inadvertent desecration of the base text. The arrangement in the table
below was made by Arabic grammarians on the basis of similarity in the shapes
of the letters. More on arrangements later.

The final Arabic alphabet. Compare with the first table above which gives the same number of sounds but with fewer letters

2.The second
characteristic of the Arabic script of not marking vowels also caused
confusions, especially between verb forms which often have the same shape and
letters but different short vowels and sometimes between plurals and verb
forms. The example below illustrates the latter confusion.

This
vowel problem was initially overcome by the pioneer grammarian Abul Aswad AdDuali (d.688AD) at the behest of the Umayyad Caliph AbdUl Malik (d.705AD), who was also instrumental in switching the administrative
language of the entire Arabian empire from a patchwork of Greek, Aramaic and
Pahlavi over to Arabic after he caught a Greek scribe urinating into the ink
well used to write out the official records for lack of water to prepare the
ink. The solution proposed by the grammarian Abul Aswad seems to have been
partially inspired by similar solutions in other Semitic script traditions:
place dots around each letter to indicate short vowel sounds for that letter.
Abul Aswad is also credited with inventing the symbols for the Hamza and the
Khafeef vowels and the Shadda. Before, the Khafeef (absence of any vowel) and
the Shadda (doubling of a consonant) were not depicted at all, hence the
Khafeef and the Shadda too had to be inferred from the context of the base
text. This system of Abul Aswad was further refined by the 8th Century
grammarian and author of the first Arabic dictionary, Al Khalil ibn AhmedFaraaheedi (d.791AD) who replaced the dots with smaller versions of the
corresponding long vowel sounds. This has been illustrated in the table below.

Vowel Name and Sound

Abul Aswad Ad-Duali's (d.688AD) Vowel Markers

Al Khalil ibn Ahmed's (d. 791AD) Vowel Markers

Fatha
- Short "a" - "Ma"

ݥ

مَ

Dhamma - Short "u" - "Mu"

م.

مُ

Kasra - Short "i" - "Mi"

ݦ

مِ

Tanwin - Short Nunation - "Dan, Dun, Din"

ڍ , د.. , ڌ

دٍ , دٌ,داً

Shadda - doubling of a consonant sound

Symbol unknown to me

ّ

Khafeef aka Sukoon - absence of any vowel sound

Symbol unknown to me

ْ , ۡ

Hamza - glottal stop

ء

ء , ؤ , ئ , أ , إ

Middle Abbasid Caliphate Era onwards

These two changes
were not accepted immediately by the religious members of the Muslim community
largely as a result of fear of innovating the received text of the Quran.
Similar fears also dissuaded the Jews from accepting any diacritical points or matres lectionis to identify letters or vowels
over the base text of the standardized Hebrew Bible until well over a thousand
years after the composition of the last book of the Hebrew Bible. It took close
to 250-300 years after the revelation of the Quran for the vowel markers and
diacritical points to become a common place feature in Qurans. Interestingly
the Jewish initiative, called the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, and the
Muslim initiative for making these changes in the Quran were both finalised
around the same time, being almost contemporaneous events, within 50-75 years
of each other. Further both of these sacred texts with the diacritical marks
and vowel points are now the standard texts for their respective religions
(though only unmarked, base text Hebrew Bibles are used for liturgy).

Very early Kufic Arabic Quranic calligraphy from
Yemen.

Shows only the base text.

No vowel markers - No diacritical points to
distinguish between phonemes

Kufic Arabic calligraphy, Surah Hujjarat, 9th
Century. Text on the obverse side is visible due of inadequate thickness of the
parchment.

Shows base text. Coloured vowel markers added later
in Abul Aswad's style over base text in an effort to standardize the sounds.

Shows base text, vowel markers in the newer Al Khalil
style and diacritical points all made as part of the writing at the same time.

However
by the turn of 10th-11th Century Qurans employed both diacritical points and
vowel markers and from then have been mandatorily written with diacritical points and vowel marks. By this time non-Quranic Arabic texts also used the diacritical
points as standard usage, though they did not use vowel markers. In non-sacred and non-school texts, the ancient Semitic habit of not
marking vowels has managed to keep its hold till today. As a result only the
diacritical points are marked in the majority of Arabic texts and the short
vowels are left unmarked, to be guessed by reference to context. Even religious
commentaries on the Quran and Hadith do not carry the short vowel markers. All
other scripts based on Arabic such as Persian/Urdu/Turkic have also continued
with this same tradition. Though in certain rare cases vowels are marked to
clear ambiguity.The following examples will make the partial usage of vowel marks more clear.

A textbook to teach Arabic from the 1950s, employs
vowel markers in every word to remove ambiguity.

Modern printed version of the first page of the
celebrated Introduction or "Muqadimah" of Ibn Khaldun's 14th century
Arabic treatise on history, politics, economics and sociology. Again, barely
discernable use of vowel markers

Modern printed version of the first page of the Persian translation of Mevlana Rumi's "Fi Hi Ma Fi Hi" ( In It Is What Is In It). Notice that although most of the sentences do not have vowel marks, some sentences do. These sentences are verses from the Quran which must always be written with vowel marks.

First page of the famous turn of 20th Century Urdu
novel, Umrao Jaan Ada, bereft of vowel markers but for the short vowel u in the
name Umrao

The Arabic Alphabet

The modern standard Arabic alphabet arranged according to similarilty in shapes of the letters

Note that many letters have different slightly
different stand-alone, initial, medial and final forms. This feature is common
to many Semitic scripts and seems to be an ancient feature of these scripts.

Along with the shapes and sounds of the Arabic letters, the
numerical values of these letters are also fundamental. Many Semitic and
non-Semitic alphabets assign numerological values to their letters.. Often in
earlier times, the letters were used as numbers based on their numerical values
in lieu of any special number symbols, until Hindu numerals (to the Arabs) were
adopted by the Abbasid Caliphs in early 9th Century and then later on adopted
by most of the West as Arab numerals. Hence the letter أwas used for the value
1, the letter ب was used for the value
2,تfor 3, جfor 4 and
so on; these first fourletters,
A-B-J-D, which correspond to values, 1-2-3-4 were together called the abjd and gave rise to the
term abjd for the Arabic alphabet. The numerical arrangement of the Arabic
alphabet is given below. Other Semitic scripts also follow this same numerical
system. The numerical values of letters are used for various purposes such as
religious symbolism, magic and divination, astrology and occult and even for
seeking divine patterns. The table below shows the numerical values and
arrangements of the letters.

The arrangement of Arabic letters into numbers is called Taarikh تاريخor Chronogram and the most famous chronogram in Arabic is
undoubtedly the number 786 which is derived as follows:

بسم لله- bism illah -
2+60+40+1+30+30+5 = 168

الرّحمن- a(l) rrahman -
1+30+200+8+40+50 = 329

الرّحيم - a(l) rraheem -
1+30+200+8+10+40 = 289

168+329+289
= 786

The title
of one of my favourite books, Bagh - o - Bahar is also a chronogram which gives
the value 1217AH corresponding to 1802AD, the year in which the book was
written. Chronograms have been used for thousands of years and can sneak up on
you quite suddenly, which is why they are so much fun!

We have already noted two arrangements of the Arabic alphabet: the
one arranged according to similarity in the shapes of the letters and the other
based on the numerical values of the letters. A third arrangement of the Arabic
alphabet was created by the grammarian Al Khalil ibn Ahmed Faraaheedi (d.791AD), whom we
have already encounteredas the one who
perfected the vowel marker system. Al Khalil Faraaheedi wrote the first
dictionary of Arabic, Kitaab al Ayn, in which he arranged the letters neither
according
to their shapes nor according to their values but according to where their sound originates in
the mouth. His dictionary starts with Aynعas the first letter because it is voiced from the
lowest point in the throat and moving upwards and outwards in the mouth, ends
with Meem مas the last letter because it is voiced from the tip of the lips.
Because the first letter in this dictionary is Ayn it is called Kitaab al Ayn.

These
three arrangements of the Arabic alphabet are not exhaustive.

Persian, Urdu, Turkic, Malay and Allied Scripts

Persian, Urdu,
Turkic, Malay use the Arabic script for their own sounds by mapping the Arabic
letters onto similar sounds from their alphabet. However in the case of each of
these languages their sound space is much larger than the one catered to by the
28 Arabic letters and this has neccesitated the innovation of new shapes from
with the 28 letter repertoire in each of these languages.

Additional letters
can be spotted in the alphabet tables given below:

Persian / Daari alphabet

Urdu alphabet

Ottoman Turkish alphabet

Sindhi alphabet

Jawi / Malay alphabet

I hope this post has helped you to understand the basics of the development of the Arabic script and will point you in the right direction.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Most people know of William Jones' superhyperparanormal command of scores of languages, precocious childhood and ever more prodigious adulthood. Most also know that he was the founding father of the famous Asiatic Society of Bengal. However, few are aware that William Jones also went around by the nom de plume Yunis Uksfardi.

In 1771 William Jones wrote a book on Persian Grammar. On the inner title page of this Persian Grammar, William Jones wrote his name in Persian text as Yunis Uksfardi. The sheer sense of wow which I got the first time I encountered this Persian rendition of William Jones' name can not be described. I think it was akin to suddenly finding a small fantastic treasure buried under one's bed.

Uksfardi obviously comes from Oxford and refers, perhaps, to the deep sense of attachment that William Jones may have had for the University of Oxford. He seemed to treasure his association with the University of Oxford so much that he selected Oxford rather than his place of birth, Westminster, as his last name in Persian. Perhaps he took up Uksfardi as the second part of his pen name because it was at Oxford that he learnt Arabic and then Persian under the tutelage of a Syrian native, Mirza of Aleppo, whom William Jones chanced upon in London and requested him to help him learn these tongues. William Jones was very highly regarded at Oxford and won quite a few accolades during his time there. In 1780 he even contested in the Parliament for the seat from Oxford.

Why did William Jones choose Yunis as his first name though? Some are of the opinion that Jones is a Welsh contraction of John (or of son of John). In this case William Jones had two choices for rendering John into Persian (Arabic):

Youhanna - the Christian Arab version of the name John

Yahya - the Islamic Arab version of the name John

He swept aside both options in favour of Yunis. There has to be a reason for this choice.

But why Yunis, why?

One gets an idea of William Jones' inclination towards the re-discovery of Ancient Oriental knowledge from the (celebrated) Preface to his Grammar of the Persian Language. The Preface is truly an introduction to the Persian language as it goes into the details of describing the Persian language as well as of the development of the language. He extols the virtues of Oriental knowledge and also denies any validity of the various excuses the British of his time used to make for not showing an interest in Persian culture; ranging from being too busy to waste time on Persian to Persian being a language of barbarians and or of believers in Mahomet, to everything else in between. Bear in mind that in 1771, warfare between the fractious European powers and the Ottoman Empire was still very common indeed and also that European imperialism was now taking firm shape. William Jones cites Voltaire's unbridled appreciation of Persian literature in support of his ideas. He goes on to explain how Persian has started becoming very important for the British in India for good governance and politics as all court correspondence, firmans and petitions are in Persian and every British official in the Indian courts must be able to hold his own when it comes to reading and writing in proper Persian without resorting to Munshis. This book on Persian Grammar is clearly targeted at the British officials in India. I think I remember reading somewhere that William Jones wrote this book at the request of a director of the East India Company who wanted a Persian manual for the EIC officers. Earlier they had to rely solely on the Indian Munshis for learning Persian and other Indian languages. However, soon after, the British realised the importance of employing local dialects rather than Persian or Sanskrit while conversing with the commoners. To this end, Fort William College was established in Calcutta at the turn of the 19th century. The British of course, sounded the death knell for Persian in India when they outlawed its use as an official language of British India around half a century after the publication of the first edition of William Jones' Persian Grammar.

In his Preface, William Jones laments the fact that he does not have enough time to write an accompanying history of Persian literature. William Jones, of course had earlier already translated many books on Persian history from Persian into European languages. Perhaps in the title pages of these texts also he may have given his name as Yunis Uksfardi. He gives pointers to Europeans on which intermediate and advanced texts to study in order to extend their basic learning ("the first book I would recommend is... Gulistan, the Bed of Roses..."). William Jones informs the reader that if the learner follows his advice then he will be able to correspond with any prince in India and with any commoner within a year of starting his studies. He also suggests that mastery of the various aspects of Arabic (Arabick) will be completely essential for attaining truly dizzying heights in the knowledge of Persian.

Although William Jones' Persian Grammar is good as a book for learning Persian but it's not the best.. Perhaps it was the best book of its kind in English when it came out but then it was soon eclipsed by other Persian manual. Lt. Col D C Phillott's magnificent book comes to mind immediately as a later day example of a much more exhaustive text, but there is no doubt that William Jones's book was the path finder for learning Persian through English. William Jones' Persian Grammar proved so useful and famous that it has to date never really gone out of publication (latest edition 2010). For me, the true value of the book lies not so much in the main didactic section but rather in the Preface, which William Jones uses very well to converse with his reader and to put forth his case for the study of Oriental subjects.

I end by quoting the last paragraph from Yunis Uksfardi's Preface to his Persian Grammar:

" As to the literature of Asia, it will not, perhaps, be essentially useful to the greater part of mankind, who have neither leisure nor inclination to cultivate so extensive a branch of learning; but the civil and natural history of such mighty empires as India, Persia, Arabia and Tartary, cannot fail of delighting those who love to view the great picture of the universe, or to learn by what degrees the most obscure states have risen to glory, and the most flourishing kingdoms sunk to decay; the philosopher will consider those works as highly valuable by which he may trace the human mind in all its appearances, from the rudest to the most cultivated state. and the man of taste will undoubted be pleased to unlock the stores of native genius, and to gather the flowers of unrestrained and luxuriant fancy"

I still can't get over Yunis Uksfardi being the nom de plume of William Jones. I think it would have been fantastic to meet him.

Friday, August 24, 2012

"There
are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as if
they had never happened before…"

Les Uns et Les Autres is
one movie worth watching. Again and again. From the first scene till the last
there is one big circle of events, people and lives. At just under three hours hours, Les Une et Les Autres is a long movie but these three hours are amongst the best three hours I have ever spent on cinema. The story of Les Uns et Les Autres may seem as if it is about artists being herded into war; though soon we come to realise the reality, that it is never the one soldier who fights the war against his state's enemy but his entire family which finds itself at war, with cruel fate. For what else is it to the mother of an infant when her husband is executed for trying to escape his POW camp a few hours before the official end of hostilities. Or when middle aged parents are told the heart wrenching news of the death of their sons in combat even as across the street their neighbour is welcomed back home from the war by his wife and children singing to the tune of a jazz orchestra. Incredulous juxtapositioning? Perhaps to the inhabitants of today's world, secure as it is from any large scale armed conflicts between nations, yes. But not false. And it certainly can and does happen.

Music is the binding thread inLes Uns et Les Autres. It is the story of four families and their friends over the course of 25 odd years. Three of the four families, one each from USA, France and Germany , are connected to playing music and the fourth, a Russian family, is associated with dancing to music. The characters (and their children and children's children) over the decades keeping walking in and out of each other's lives usually without anyone realizing their mutual connections from the past. And perhaps that is how it is in real life too and if it is or it isn't, how will we ever know, after all , we don't realize the connections we share with other random people criss crossing our lives, because once we do realize the connection, they stop being random people. Ancient friendships which stains under the weight of things kept unsaid, and angry recriminations erupting at the wrong time, only to be bolstered by the feeling of camaraderie and bitter sweet memories. A badge of honour from the wrong man which will forever be an albatross around one's neck. People who know what to do to get by when the times change; who know how to bet on the winning horse every time but only for so so long for fortune is just one giant Ferris wheel. The stories of the War generation give way to the stories of the 60s generation and yet the stories are essentially the same ...as if they had never happened before… the Ferris wheel keeps coming back. Even the ending of the movie comes back to the beginning.

One thing I liked about the movie is that certain key scenes involve the supporting cast. In fact there are no protagonists, everyone who is shown in the movie has a significant role to play in some way just as in real life everyone is equally important, in a way. Comic relief is provided in the form of the two teenage brothers who can not give up on even the smallest of oppourtunities to throw punches at each other (in good humour) though ultimately there is a tragedy in this as well. The overall sense is one of tragedy. The last one hour moves quite quickly. Time loses its continuum and leaps back and forth, some scenes are genuinely confusing as the same actors play both the parent and the child or the grand parent and the child. This technique of narration takes some getting used to but fits perfectly into the overall "feel" of the movie. Some pretty solid editing manages to hold everything together.

There is minimal
use of dialogues. Most of the narrative progression is through visuals and not
through dialogues. Significant events, such as courtship and marriages, come to
happen over the course of a few seconds. Yet, there a voice which does narrate
certain events which are not shown to have passed but lead to other events in
the chronological progression of the script. The narrative is mostly linear. Some of the dialogues are truly inspirational. Sample this one; "No man who has known war could ever start another. Those who start wars must know no friends nor lovers. Must be their way to get revenge on those who are happy."

Claude Lelouche's direction is fantastic. The way the focus moves from the key characters in the foreground
to the supporting cast in the distant background brings out the significance
those supporting roles have for the movie. Cinematography is quite good. Fantastic use of zooms to take the viewer inside the thoughts of the character on scree and at other times to fix the character inside the larger frame of things. My favourite such scene is the mental asylum scene shot through the window in which the camera follows a middle aged son as he walks towards his old and mentally ailing estranged mother siting alone on a solitary bench in the light of the setting sun. I loved the winding staircases which keep cropping up throughout the movie and the extremely wide angled fast moving circular shots of these winding staircases. Long shots where the camera follows the actor are also well suited to the overall aura of the story. I liked everyone's performance in Les Uns et Les Autres, Geraldine Chaplin in particular has acted quite well. I felt she did a great job in Doctor Zhivago too. Actually everyone's dished out great performances.

I have added another great title to my list of all time favourite movies and I am sure Les Uns et Les Autres will touch every one who see it in one way or another.

And the dancing...did I mention the phenomenal dancing? Check out Jorge Donn move to Maurice Ravel's unforgettable Bolero.

Oh! An there's even a glimpse of Sharon Stone thrown in for good measure.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

The Statistics of Climate Change - A Case Analysis of Dr James Hansen's 2012 Paper

Climate change is such a hotly debated topic that almost everyone has an opinion on it and even to not have an opinion ("I just don't know") is a valid opinion as many believe that we still do not have enough data to swing the decision in either side's favour.

The phenomenally controversial head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies of NASA and noted Anthropogenic Global Warming proponent, Dr James Hansen has published a paper called Perception of Climate Change, in a scientific journal called Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which he gives statistical data for temperature changes over the last six decades in the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth. Using this data, Dr Hansen concludes that the Earth has been getting much warmer and that the evidence is incontrovertible. Further he also claims that extreme weather situations have become much more common than earlier. The Economist has carried a story on this study and this is where I first read about the study.

The data graph of the study given in The Economist

Description of the Graph :

The data plotted pertains to temperature readings during the months from June to August for six decades starting from 1950s down to 2011 for the Northern Hemisphere.

The data plotted is relative data not absolute data. This has been done to facilitate better comparisons.

The reference curve (given in Dark Brown) comprises the average temperature values from 1951 to 1980; this builds a base with which to compare the temperature variations in each of the six decades. 1951-80 has been taken as a reference because this time period is long enough to build a normalized data range.

0 marked on the X axis (standard deviation) is the average temperature for the reference curve (1951-1980), which obviously has a sstandard deviation value of 0.

The data for each decade is Normally Distributed and hence the peak frequency value for each decade coincides with the Mean(Average)/Median/Mode temperature of that decade. Further the 68-95-99.7 rule holds wherein 68% of the temperature values for any decade fall within 1 standard deviation on either side of the Mean temperature value, 95% temperature values fall within 2 standard deviations on either side of the Mean and 99.7% fall within 3 standard deviation.

Dr Hansen describes an "Extreme Condition" as a temperature value which falls beyond 3 standard deviations from the Mean ie beyond 99.7% of the temperature range. This obviously has to be an absolute limit because uncomfortable or harmful weather is mostly an absolute figure in the short run. In the long run, life could perhaps adapt to the permanent changes but then a few decades can not be considered enough for adapting to these extreme conditions. These Extreme Conditions are perhaps the most important part of the data, from Dr Hansen's point of view.

Conclusions from the Graph:

The data plotted clearly shows an increase in the average Summer temperature with each new decade. This can be observed from a right shift, along the X axis, of the Mean temperature value for Reach successive decade as shown by the peak of the Normal Curve for that decade. The Reference Curve's Mean temperature value moves from 0 to 1 for 2001-2011.

The data also shows a much broader range and hence variation of temperatures for each successive decade. This can be seen from the increasingly flattening Normal Distribution. As one moves from one decade to the next, the frequency for the temperature starts to spread out over a wider range which shows up as a lower and flatter curve than the one for the previous decade. This means that since 1951 temperatures have been fluctuating as an ever increasingly pace. This large variation translates into lesser and lesser equitable climate, lesser reliable weather and could mean greater stress on crops and businesses and more discomfort for people, animals, plants and vegetation in general. The number of recordings for the Mean temperature drops from 0.4 readings in the Reference Curve to 0.3 in the 2001-2011 curve.

The cases of Extreme Conditions in weather,as defined by Dr Hansen, were about 0.3% or less for the Reference Curve but for the 2001-2011 decade these were 6-8% or even more for the hot right side of the curve (though not so for the cold left side). This can be inferred from the right most part of the 2001-2011 Normal Curve, representing perhaps 1.5 standard deviations which has crept in the zone of Extreme Heat. Hence there are 6-8% temperature values for the decade of 2001-11 which fall into the category of Extreme Heat. Hot weather extremities are clearly on the rise as well.

Positive Attributes of the Study:

The GISS data is all encompassing. Data for the entire Earth has been collected. This is not a sample survey, this is a reading of the entire data universe (the entire Earth in this case). Climate is always a global phenomenon(as opposed to weather) and that is why climate change can only be talked about on a global scale. Rising temperatures in one or many parts of the globe will always be concomitant with other related phenomena in other parts of the globe. This universality of data is one of the two big advantages of this study. On the flip side however, only the data for the Summer months in the Northern Hemisphere has been actually plotted in the Normal Curves (see the Doubts section below for more details)

Data plotted is actually recorded data, not future projected data. There are no modelling results used here, no assumptions to validate or disprove. This is all genuine and historic data, hence the readings, at least, are unassailable. This, absolute independence from projected data to my mind is the the other big advantage of this study.

This data analysis has been accepted by a leading scientific journal called Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and this gives it some serious credibility, though, it is no guarantee of the water tightness of the analysis.

Doubts over the Study

Statistics have to earn our trust. We can't give it away for free to them. They have to be able to withstand our scrutiny. And this applies more so to statistics we want should be true, the ones which prove something we hold dear. Or else, suddenly, we might find ourselves betrayed by our own hasty acceptance of data we want to believe in.
Data Doubts

Is a period of 60 years enough to provide data for climate change? What is the accepted time
span amongst the scientific community for talking about climate rather than weather, especially when discussing long series temperature changes? In fact, is there is any consensus at all about the time span? What results do we get when we analyse the data for the last 100 years (provided we have reliable global temperature data going back that far).

Why only plot the data for the Northern Hemisphere and not for the Southern Hemisphere? Perhaps one explanation can be that this has been done in order to facilitate a true comparison. Summer in the Northern Hemisphere extends from June to August, whereas at this time the Southern Hemisphere usually experiences Winter. Hence in order to compare apples with apples, one needs to select the Summer months' data from one hemisphere ie compare June-August data for each year for the Northern Hemisphere and compare December-March data for each year for the Southern Hemisphere. The temperature data for the Summer months in the Southern Hemisphere should be plotted separately as a Normal Distribution for a truly global analysis. If there is indeed global warming taking place then the data for the Southern Summer months will further support this conclusion because, again, climate is a global phenomenon.

Correlation and Causation

Although, in this scientific paper Dr Hansen has not made any claims about the causes of this clear rise in global temperatures, he is a vociferous advocate of Anthropogenic Global Warming (read human induced global warming) and will place this data analysis in that context.

I think the single most important caveat for anyone looking at statistics, be they of weekly milk prices for one's household budget or climate change figures, is to not confuse correlation with causation. Sympathetic movement of two things does not imply a dependency relationship between those two things. Recently Krishnamurthy V Subramanian of the Indian School of Business has written a very lucid and meaningful article on the difference between correlation and causation. It can be accessed here.

I believe that climate change is being brought about human actions.I don't know this but I believe it. I am constantly trying to find ways to reduce my carbon footprint. However I do not wish to be slotted into either of the two opposing camps.

However instead of going into why I believe this I would like to dwell on some questions come to my mind based only on rationale. The answers to these questions will need more data and analysis but once answered they will perhaps help convert my belief into my knowledge and certainly aid policy makers and businesses to come to terms with the reality of our economic activities (again provided these questions are answered).

These questions directly address the correlation and causation problem for this study on climate change. Answering these could help convert any correlation between greenhouse emissions and climate change into a casual relationship and further even establish the direction of the relationship.

How are we certain that human action is causing climate change? Evidence seems to suggest that for all of the previous climate changes in the 4.5 odd billion years long history of our planet, humans have not even been around to witness them, let alone influence them.

Other causes need to be eliminated (though I personally do not give much credence to most of them) such as increased Solar activity, fundamental geo-changes, inner core dynamics etcetera.

Perhaps this time, that we are living in, is the inflection point of a very long run millions of years long climate cycle and hence this sudden acceleration might be a regular thing before such a cycle enter the next phase.

Could it be that in the absence of greenhouse gas emissions temperatures would drop rapidly? Is human activity somehow forestalling the next Ice Age, is this delaying of the Ice Age somehow better (but at what cost)? Perhaps there are some human activities which are masking the effect of excess CO2 (such as smoke emission which cools as opposed to CO2 emission which warms)

The data above clearly points to increasing weather temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere since the 1950s. Further heat extremities are also rising, fast. But I do need to clear my reservations, as given above in the Data Doubts section, before I can whole heatedly embrace the analysis. Perhaps within the next few years even more conclusive and exhaustive statistical studies on climate change will be carried. I eagerly await that time.